WHY LAWNS ARE NOT GREEN! The
Case Against Lawns

I
eat fertilizer by the bucket, I drink water by the TON.What do I give you? NOT
A LOT OF FUN! Vanity vanity

all
is vanity.

Instead of having kids run around on
this green carpet thing, send them in the house to run around on a proper
carpet and watch documentaries on TV like good little modern children and
you go for a VICTORY GARDEN and an '*Edible*Estate'

The front lawn is so deeply embedded in our national psyche that we don't
really see it any more, at least for what it actually is. What is that
chasm between house and street? Why is it there? Or rather, why is nothing
there?

I grew up surrounded by a lawn. This is a common American phenomenon.
Perhaps the first growing thing most of us experience as a child is, indeed,
a mowed grassy surface. How are a child's ideas of "the natural" affected
by this? Of course, there is nothing remotely natural about a lawn. It
is an industrial landscape disguised as organic plant material.

As a teenager I passed many weekend afternoons mowing the lawn and I
loved it. The more overgrown the lawn, the greater the sense of satisfaction
as you roar over it to reveal that crisp trimmed surface and fresh grassy
smell. I suppose most of my outdoor time as a youth was spent on a lawn.
It is the first defensive ring between the family unit and everything beyond.
It is the border control that physically and psychologically keeps wilderness,
city, and strangers at a safe distance.

The English Estate

The lawn has its roots in England and is the foundation for any proper
English landscape. In spite of the unnatural repression of all other
plants, a lawn of mowed grass makes some sense in England, with its regular
rainfall and cool climate. Animals grazed, lawn games were played, and
the wilderness had been civilized and kept at bay with the crisp line where
the grass ended. The front lawn was born of vanity and decadence, under
the assumption that fertile land was infinite.

The English estate owner in Tudor times would demonstrate his vast wealth
by not growing food on the highly visible fecund property in front
of his residence. Instead this vast swath of land would become a stage
of ornamental green upon which he could present his immense pile of a house.
Look
at how rich I am!

Similarly, the plumage of the male peacock advertises well-being and
virility, and when he fans his feathers, he shows he can spare the enormous
energy necessary to put on such a phenomenal display. The better the display,
the healthier the peacock, and the more likely he is to attract a mate.
In the case of the English estate owner, the expanse of green signals financial
health and power.

This obsession with the lawn is, I believe, almost entirely a male phenomenon.
It is an enticing and toxic stew of male seduction, aggression, and domination.
Whether intended to attract a mate, demonstrate wealth, impress his friends,
or control every bit nature that surrounds him, the lawn is covered with
the fingerprints of masculine tendencies.

Once that fertile farmland in front of the English estate had been turned
into a sterile monoculture, where did the cultivation of food happen? Out
of view, of course, hidden in a remote section of the property where visitors
and the lord of the estate would never see it. This was perhaps the beginning
of the notion that plants that produce food are ugly and should not be
seen. Today the idea has played itself out at an industrial global scale,
with our produce grown on the other side of the planet. The only landscape
worthy of the public eye is made of ornamentals, trimmed within an inch
of their lives, inhospitable to other creatures, always the same and never
changing with the seasons.

The Birth of the American Dream

Even if you have never seen Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in the hills
of Virginia, you know it well. It is still the de facto prototype for the
American home. You may recognize its prominent features in many contemporary
housing developments: the Palladian windows, the white-columned portico,
the red brick facade, and the vast green lawn that dominates the landscape
around it. Jefferson's house is very much in the tradition of the English
estate.

Master of all it surveys, wilderness at bay, anchored on the lawn, the
illusion of absolute independence-this is still the model for most Americans'
real-estate fantasies. Jefferson had a well-documented love affair with
his kitchen garden, which was really more like a small domestic farm. He
kept a detailed diary of its growth and evolution through the seasons and
years. He lavished upon it devoted attention and care. It seems to have
been one of the great passions of his life. And yet, where did he locate
it?

The house is clearly the focus of the site, on top of the hill and the
center of all power. But his beloved garden is hidden from view, to the
side and slightly down the hill. The lawn and flowerbeds are laid out in
soft decorative curves, a pleasing complement to the house and obviously
meant for pleasure. The hidden productive garden, however, is terraced
on a long straight bed, divided into a grid, crops arrayed neatly in rows.
With that binary division between sterile ornamental pleasure and pragmatic
secluded production, Jefferson reinforced an attitude toward our national
landscape that we are still living with today. Roll out the lawn and hide
the crops!

Given Monticello's early influence, how would American neighborhoods
look today if Jefferson had decided to plant his food in front of his house
instead? The world wars left many farms across the United States short-handed.
The federal government embarked on a campaign to encourage Americans to
do their part by growing food on their own property. First called war gardens
and later victory gardens,
they quickly became popular across the country.

By the end of World War II, over 80 percent of American households were
growing some of their own food. Within months after Victory Day this activity
quickly subsided. With its demise went the widespread knowledge among most
Americans of how to grow their own food. In SchrebergÃ¤rten
in Germany today we see some evidence of what a neighborhood of victory
gardens might have looked like. These community gardens were first developed
as a social program in nineteenth-century Berlin.

Residents were allotted plots in green belts at the periphery of the
city, giving them the opportunity to seek respite from the confines of
their urban lives by traveling a short distance to work in a food and flower
garden. On each plot they would construct a small cottage, and many relocated
to these tiny shelters after the city was bombed during World War II. Visiting
these gardens, which can still be found throughout Germany, is like stepping
into either some agrarian past or a utopian future.

Each yard is a diverse and abundant display of food growing. Most of
the gardens are meticulously groomed and maintained to such an extent that
it becomes clear this is not just about sustenance; they are also meant
to be delightful pleasure gardens. In this otherworldly neighborhood of
gardens, modest human quarters are subservient to the land that feeds the
residents.

Back in the United States, the introduction of the leisure weekend,
the abundance of fresh water, the production of industrial pesticides,
the availability of the lawn mower and cheap gas, and the rise of home
ownership with the explosion of new suburban housing developments in the
1940s and '50s all set the stage for the unfurling of the great American
lawn as we know it today. Its puritanical aspects seem suited to the Eisenhower
years of good manners. Is there a connection between landscape and hairstyles?
Trimmed grass and crew cuts seem like obvious companions. Nature is not
something you surrender to; rather, if you use enough industrial force,
you can bend it to your will. This premise and the assumption that land
and natural resources were in infinite supply are in part what gave us
today's lawned landscape.

Hindsight and Foresight

It's easy to be the Monday morning quarterback when we evaluate what
previous generations have handed down to us. Coming out of a depression
and two world wars, our elders had every right to celebrate the comforts
and conveniences of industrial progress. Its hidden long-term costs and
a blind faith in its capacity to solve any problem created a sense that
things could only get better.

This is an optimism we have lost for the moment, as we are coming to
terms with the limits of our resources and land. Now that we know more
about what constitutes a healthy life for future generations, it's time
for some questions. Before we spread out farther, how do we want to occupy
the space we have already claimed? Why do we dedicate so much property
to a space that has so minor a function and requires many precious resources
and endless hours to maintain, while contaminating our air and water?

The American front lawn is now almost entirely symbolic. Aristocratic
English spectacle and drama has degenerated into a bland garnish for our
endless suburban sprawl and alienation. The monoculture of one plant species
covering our neighborhoods from coast to coast celebrates puritanical homogeneity
and mindless conformity. An occasional lawn for recreation can be a delight,
but most of them are occupied only when they are being tended.

Today's lawn has become the default surface for any defensible private
space. If you don't know what to put there, plant grass seed and keep watering.
Driving around most neighborhoods you will see lush beds of grass being
tended on narrow unused strips of land. In the United States we plant more
grass than any other crop: currently lawns cover more than thirty million
acres. Given the way we lavish precious resources on it and put it everywhere
that humans go, aliens landing in any American city today would assume
that grass must be the most precious earthly substance of all.

WHY
LAWNS ARE NOT GREEN!The lawn devours resources
while it pollutes. It is maniacally groomed
with mowers and trimmers powered by the two-stroke motors that are
responsible for much of our greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrocarbons from
mowers react with nitrogen oxides in the presence of sunlight to produce
ozone. To eradicate invading plants the lawn is drugged with pesticides
and herbicides, which are then washed into our water supply with sprinklers
and hoses, dumping our increasingly rare fresh drinking resource down the
gutter. (Birds drink it and die.)

Meanwhile, at the grocery store we confront our food. Engineered fruits
and vegetables wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam are cultivated not for
taste but for appearance, uniformity, and ease of transport, then sprayed
with chemicals to inhibit the diseases and pests that thrive in an unbalanced
ecosystem. The produce in the average American dinner is trucked 1,500
miles to reach our plates. We don't know where our fruits and vegetables
came from or who grew them. Perhaps we have even forgotten that plants
were responsible for the mass-produced meal we are consuming. This detachment
from the source of our food breeds a careless attitude toward our role
as custodians of the land that feeds us. Perhaps we would reconsider what
we put down the drain, on the ground, and in the air if there was more
direct evidence that we will ultimately ingest it. The garden began behind
walls, a truce, a compromise, between human need and natural resource.

In most languages the word "garden" derives from the root "enclosure."
The garden walls protected human cultivation from the wild threats in the
untamed expanses. Now that a wilderness unaffected by human intervention
no longer exists, the garden walls have fallen. The enclosed, cultivated
space protected behind the house is no longer a worthwhile model. The entire
street must be viewed as a garden, and by extension the entire city we
are tending, and beyond. We have intervened on all levels of environmental
function, and with no walls remaining we have taken on the role of planetary
gardener by default.

Edible Estates

The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic
front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. Food grown in our
front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth,
and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of
the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of biodiversity.
In becoming gardeners we will reconsider our connection to the land, what
we take from it, and what we put in it. Each yard will be a unique expression
of its location and of the inhabitant and his or her desires.

Our Planet

Most of us feel like we don't any have any control over the direction
in which our world is headed. As always, the newspapers are full of daily
evidence for concern. Unlike the challenges of past generations, however,
these struggles are no longer just localized or broadly regional; they
are an interlaced web of planetary challenges. How, then, do we respond
in the face of the impossible scale of issues such as global energy production,
climate change, and the related political aggressions and instabilities
that accompany them? One thing we can do is act where we have influence,
and in a capitalist society, that would be our private property. Here we
have the freedom to create in some small measure the world in which we
want to live.

Our Climate

We grow a lawn the same way anywhere in the world, but when we grow
our own food we have to start paying attention to where we are. We experience
our weather and climate in a personal way: they have a direct impact on
us. The subtleties of sun, wind, air, and rain are meaningful.

Our Government

A functioning democracy is predicated upon an informed populace of citizens
who are in touch with each other. A democratic society suffers when people
are physically out of touch. An Edible Estate can serve to stitch communities
back together, taking a space that was previously isolating and turn it
into a welcoming forum that re-engages people with one another.

Our City

There was a time when the effect of a town on the land around it was
clearly in evidence within a radius of a few miles. For the most part the
town depended on the materials, food, trades, and other resources that
were available in the immediate region. The detritus of that consumption
would stay within that same sphere of influence. Today the entire story
of the impact of any city has become invisible because it is global. Cheap
factory labor, foreign oil, circuitous water distribution systems, industrialized
agriculture, and remote landfills all contribute to a general ignorance
of the effects that daily human life has on the planet. What happens when
you graft agriculture onto a city? The more we keep ourselves in touch
with the byproducts of our daily lives, the more we are reminded of how
it is all connected. Edible Estates puts that evidence back in our cities
and streets, back in our face.

Our Street

Edible Estate gardens are meant to serve as provocations on the street.
What happens when we share a street with one of these gardens? The front-yard
gardeners become street performers for us. Coming out the door to tend
their crops they enact a daily ritual for the neighbors. We get to know
them better than those who have lawns. We talk to them about how their
crops are doing. They often can't eat everything they are growing, so they
offer us the latest harvest of tomatoes or zucchini. We go out of our way
to walk past the garden to see what is going on. Just the act of watching
a garden grow can have a profound effect. When we observe as seeds sprout,
plants mature, and fruit is produced, we can't help but be drawn in. We
become witnesses, and are now complicit and a part of the story. (Anita
Sands Hernandez, who passed this story on by mounting it at her website
even gardens on her curb strip and driveway strip, so that passers-by can
pick fruit! Multiple fruit trees, multiple salad and other vegetable plants
are strewn out there in public to both tempt and inspire, and make desire,
covetousness! The Agri culture college prof who lives near me has peas,
tomatoes growing on the curb for all to pluck. He does me one better, having
200 canned plants on his entire lawn/curb strip and property connected
with drip irrigation tubes; he invites friends to take one can of
anything there are two of!)

Our Neighbors

What happens when an Edible Estate garden is not welcomed by the neighbors?
Why do some people feel threatened by it? Anarchy, rodents, plummeting
property values, willful self-expression, wild untamed nature, ugly decaying
plants, and winter dormancy are some of the reasons that have been given.
More to the point is a general sense that Edible Estate gardeners have
broken some unspoken law of decency.

Public tastes still favor conformity when it comes to the front yard,
and any sort of deviation from the norm signals a social, if not moral,
lapse. The abrupt appearance of such a garden on a street of endless lawns
can be surprisingly shocking, but after the neighbors watch it grow in,
they often come around. Perhaps the threats evoked by this wild intrusion
into the neighborhood will eventually be a catalyst for questions. How
far have we come from our the core of our humanity that the act of growing
our own food might be considered impolite, unseemly, threatening, radical,
or even hostile?

Our House

Private property and in particular the home has become the geographic
focus of our society. When we take stock of the standard American single-family
residence, it becomes quite clear where the priorities are. It is within
the walls of the house that the real investment and life of the residents
occur. The land outside the walls typically receives much less attention,
and can even become downright unwelcoming. Any activity in the yard will
typically happen in back, where there is privacy. We are obsessed with
our homes as protective bubbles from the realities around us. Today's towns
and cities are engineered for isolation, and growing food in your front
yard becomes a way to subvert this tendency. The front lawn, a highly visible
slice of private property, has the capacity to also be public. If we want
to reintroduce a vital public realm into our communities, those with land
and homes may ask what part of their private domain has public potential.

Our Dirt

Just the act of spending an extended period of time outside with our
hands in the dirt is a profoundly deviant act today! There is no rational
or practical reason to do it. We can get anything we need at the store,
right? The mortgage company refers to the physical house we live in as
one of the "improvements" to the property. Pretty landscaping may be considered
another improvement. But as far as the bank is concerned, the actual fertility
and health of the dirt in our front yards has no economic value. Wouldn't
it be great if a chemically contaminated lawn made a property impossible
to sell, while organic gardening and thirty years of composting would dramatically
increase our property values? Alas, today you can chart the exact economic
stratum of any residential street based exclusively on the state of its
chemically dependent front lawns.

Our Food

In the process of making the Edible Estate gardens I have encountered
some interesting reactions from people on the street. Some actually find
it strange and a bit unseemly to ingest something that has grown in your
yard. Yet most of us don't think twice before eating something grown under
the most mysterious of circumstances on the other side of the world.

What you don't know can't hurt you; out of sight out of mind. The act
of eating is the moment in which we are most intimately connected to the
world around us. We ingest into our bodies earthly matter that grew out
of organic and environmental cycles happening all the time. We are all
at the receiving end of dung and corpses decomposing, rainfall and evaporation,
solar radiation, and so forth. What happens when the source of our food
is far away and hidden from us? In moving food great distances, we pollute
and expend precious energy, but perhaps more important, we lose visible
evidence of our humble place in the big food chain.

Our Time

It is easy to romanticize gardening and food production when your life
does not depend on what you are able to grow. An Edible Estate can be a
lot of work! A lower-maintenance garden might be full of fruit trees and
perennials well suited to your climate, but a more ambitious front yard
might be full of annual vegetables and herbs that are rotated every season.
Either way it demands a certain amount of dedication and time.

Do we have enough time to grow our own food? Perhaps a better question
is: How do we want to spend the little time that we do have? How about
being outside with our family and friends, in touch with our neighbors,
while watching with satisfaction as the plants we are tending begin to
produce the healthiest local food to be found? It may be harder to defend
the time we spend sitting in our cars or watching television. But for those
who just can't be bothered, what if all the front lawns on an entire street
were turned over to urban farming teams? Each street would be lined in
a series of diverse crops. The farmers would sell the produce, and give
what was left over to the families whose yards they tend. When buying a
house, depending on your taste, you could decide if you wanted to live
on artichoke avenue or citrus circle or radish road.

Our Modest Monument

Edible Estates has no conventionally monumental intentions; it is a
relatively small and modest intervention on our streets. The gardens are
just beginning when they are planted and they continue to evolve. With
just one season of neglect some gardens may disappear entirely. Politicians,
architects, developers, urban citizens, we all crave permanent monuments
that will give a sense of place and survive as a lasting testament to ourselves
and our time. We were here! These monuments have their place, but their
capacity to bring about meaningful change in the way we live is quite limited.
A small garden of very modest means, humble materials, and a little effort
can have a radical effect on the life of a family, how they spend their
time and relate to their environment, whom they see, and how they eat.
This singular local response to global issues can become a model. It can
be enacted by anyone in the world and can have a monumental impact.

~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~

Our
POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Futurist
and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS
GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU,
also The
FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! & HOW TO SURVIVE
the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and
Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also HOW
TO LIVE on A NICKLE, The
FRUGAL PAGE.*
Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future
life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic!